Buvat's Careful Hand

"Your hand is the finest in Paris," a colleague told him once, and Buvat had heard the compliment often enough by then to accept it without false modesty. Thirty years of careful practice had earned him that reputation, and he took a plain, uncomplicated pride in it that had carried him through decades of otherwise modest employment.

"It's not a grand profession," he admitted to an apprentice once, "copying other men's words for a living. But there's real satisfaction in doing it well, whatever the young ambitious types think of the work."

The commission arrived like any other: a set of documents, precise instructions about formatting Buvat found mildly unusual but not unusual enough to question. He'd built his entire career on not asking searching questions about why a client wanted what they wanted. He simply did the work, as carefully as he'd done every commission for thirty years.

"You never ask what any of it's actually for," his apprentice observed once, watching him work.

"It's not my business to ask. My business is the quality of the hand. Whatever the client does with the pages afterward is entirely their own affair."

"Doesn't that worry you? Not knowing?"

"It's never worried me before. I don't see why it should start now." Buvat meant this sincerely, and it would take the conspiracy's actual exposure, weeks later, to teach him exactly how wrong that confidence had been.

"You copied the documents that became the conspiracy's central evidence," the magistrate told him, once the whole affair had unraveled. "Did you know what you were copying?"

"I knew I was copying documents. I didn't know what they were for. I've never known what any commission was for, in thirty years of this trade."

"That distinction may matter less to this court than it matters to you."

It mattered a great deal to Buvat privately, in the difficult weeks that followed, even as he understood the magistrate's point well enough. He'd spent thirty years treating his own careful, incurious discretion as a form of professional integrity: copy what's asked, ask nothing further, let the client's purposes remain entirely their own business. He discovered, in the conspiracy's exposure, that this exact discretion had made him considerably easier to use than a more suspicious copyist would ever have been.

"I don't know how to feel proud of the hand anymore," he told his apprentice, in the aftermath. "Not without wondering what it's actually being used for this time."

"You can't stop copying. It's your whole trade."

"I know that. I'm not going to stop." Buvat picked up his pen again, the same careful hand steadying itself over a fresh page. "I'm only going to start asking a few more questions than I used to, before I put that hand to paper for a stranger again. It cost me considerably more than I ever expected, learning I needed to."